Safe Travels

Inspiration

I’m Geoff from Houston Texas and when I saw the hackathon for an Alexa skill that connects people to their environment I thought how Alexa and AWS could have helped and saved lives during hurricane Harvey.

In Houston we struggle with flash floods and most of the US costal regions will begin to see increased flooding due to population growth and extreme weather conditions.

During the hurricane there were some very interesting circumstances for example internet never went down but city websites like the Harris county flood warning system crashed. Twitter was the primary method of sending distress calls, not 911.

What it does

Provides users with warnings based on their location before they leave a location during a severe weather event

How I built it

We built the skill using Alexa, NodeJS, and will use Amazon Machine Learning services.

Challenges I ran into

Collecting data from local municipalities.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Most people think Alexa is a novelty for the lazy but it can be used to save lives

What I learned

NodeJS is great

What's next for Is It Safe?

Incorporate better data feeds and machine learning

Built With

Try it out

Submitted to

Created by

I worked on enhancing the use case and helped to define the requirements. I also worked on the front end integration of the Alexa skill to the backend Lambda function. I also performed the demo on stage with the team.